For each phase of the U.S.-Mexican war, the
historians of both nations have played down evidence that something more
was at work than a simple conflict between two neatly defined nation-states.
They have ignored signs that other peoples were real players, and that
some "opposed" leaders were already making moves toward a shared transnational
system.

The first lethal clash between U.S. Army agents and Mexican citizens was
probably not the famous patrol action south of the Nueces River in Texas,
but an attack on an Indian people in northern California. Neither national
government cared much about the welfare or citizenship of indigenous people
in that area.

The January 1847 rebellion against U.S. authority in New Mexico, represented
generally as a rebellion by "Mexicans" against "Americans," was fed by
a borderlands community whose way of life was threatened by the polarization
between U.S. and Mexican.

Zachary Taylor's initial campaign south of the Rio Grande, while hard-fought
by troops on both sides, was conducted within a frame of shared officer-class
values, typical of leaders who thought themselves above poor-white pretensions.
Thus the Monterrey "capitulation" became a governing
metaphor for U.S.-Mexican leadership relations in that area over the following
century.

A determining force in the war was the outlook of Antonio
López de Santa Anna, who saw Mexico as one large hacienda, walled
behind its mountains, yet dependent on money from the outside world.

Winfield Scott insisted on maintaining a workable logistic cooperation
between U.S. forces and Mexican landed interests. While this came into
conflict with the short-range ambitions of President James K. Polk, it
fitted well into the long-range efforts of many governments (both U.S.
and Mexican) to confine indigenous communities within tightly-controlled
limits.

Even on the field of battle, and within their own minds at the time, Mexicans
were engaged in a sharp debate about the nature of
their nationality -- a debate that is likely to remain unresolved well
into the 21st century.

Histories written about North America in terms of dueling nation-states
have misrepresented reality.

Mexico and the United States, those two nations, may have been the most
visible "business firms" in the economy of the 1840s. But the "business
history" of conflict tells us little about its "economic history." In the
larger political economy of the U.S.-Mexican War, the elements in conflict
were three:

the planter/hacendado/merchant interest, across national lines

the ranchero/settler/peddler interest, also across national lines, and

the indigenous/slave/peasant interest, also across national lines.

Patriotic history-writing in the United States has represented the U.S.
cause in that war as one that, whether just or unjust, supported a "democratic"
settler interest. It has therefore seen Mexico as a mere lordship
of hacendados over peasants, and has slighted the similarities between
settlers and rancheros, as well as the efforts toward planter/settler consensus
on either side.

Patriotic history-writing in Mexico once assumed some kind of consensus
between hacendados and deferential peasants, against evil settlers from
abroad. It therefore played down the three-way internal conflict
between hacendado, ranchero, and indigenous elements.

The experience of both countries, in the 20th century, has been an effort
to break through this three-way tension. While business groups have
worked toward an international order based on ownership and investment,
populist elements have tried to achieve a sense of dramatic social conflict,
between "the people" and "the interests." This popular vindication,
too, leaps over national lines. Any effort to push people's thinking
back into national boxes is likely to prejudice struggles in favor of some
old paternalistic outlook within each nation.

These questions carry through to questions about the failure or success
of the Ernesto Zedillo administration in the Mexico of the 1990s.
Because the Mexican state of 1846-48 had not yet clearly mobilized Indians
as part of the national identity, the war became a crisis of conscience.
Leaders talked about a pluralistic identity. Belief in that
kind of identity would vindicate the resistance against the United States,
making it something more than the claims of one colonial elite against
another. As individuals, many Mexican leaders then and since have
sought just such social breadth and transcendence. Many more people have
thought in those inclusive terms, in Mexico, than in the United States.

But if the Mexican state should fail to achieve that kind of national
breadth, in the year 2000, and if the United States has never approached
it, then the two societies are together creating -- now -- a conclusion
about the war of the 1840s: that the U.S.-Mexican War has
amounted finally to a falling-out among thieves.